I've been playing some games on my PS1 emulator, ePSXe, lately... specifically MGS. It seems to run rather slow on my machine for some reason. Usually it's fine, although there does seem to be a general slugishness with it. At times, it gets really bad. When I ride elevators, it drops to about 30FPS. At other times, the game will bog down really bad (running around in the communication towers is a good spot for this) and it will be showing 60FPS. It seems all the latest plugins (Pete's OGL2 2.9 is what I'm using) were released around the time the GeForce 7k series/Radeon x1k series were popular. When I watch my GPU usage with GPU-Z, I watch my core clock speed fluctuate between 400 and 850MHz, and the GPU usage doesn't seem to go over 10%.

Is my hardware too new to be used by ePSXe effectively, or is it that my hardware is well over what ePSXe could even ask for, and the emulator is just crappy in the sense it slows down like that for seemingly no reason?

I've been playing some games on my PS1 emulator, ePSXe, lately... specifically MGS. It seems to run rather slow on my machine for some reason. Usually it's fine, although there does seem to be a general slugishness with it. At times, it gets really bad. When I ride elevators, it drops to about 30FPS. At other times, the game will bog down really bad (running around in the communication towers is a good spot for this) and it will be showing 60FPS. It seems all the latest plugins (Pete's OGL2 2.9 is what I'm using) were released around the time the GeForce 7k series/Radeon x1k series were popular. When I watch my GPU usage with GPU-Z, I watch my core clock speed fluctuate between 400 and 850MHz, and the GPU usage doesn't seem to go over 10%.

Is my hardware too new to be used by ePSXe effectively, or is it that my hardware is well over what ePSXe could even ask for, and the emulator is just crappy in the sense it slows down like that for seemingly no reason?

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It could be a few different things. Maybe do some googling on a setup guide to see if theres different settings that might improve it.

Ive run pcsx2 on some ps2 games on my desktop. I got slow moments on my games from time to time. I recently tried a game on my laptop which has newer hardware. core i7, gtx560. It was smooth, but I hadnt tried the game i was playing on my desktop. So hard to say if the hardware is causing the problem. Is there another emulator u can try?

Perhaps google for "PSXFin", which is a PlayStation emulator that is easy to use and to configure. I used it a several years ago to play my old PlayStation games on the PC. I believe the latest version was 1.13.

If i remember correctly, there was an issue with MGS1 and OpenGL2 plugin, i think i remember posting it in emuforums before, i just then defaulted to the older D3D or OGL plugin. Shame since OGL2 had better graphical output and shader based framebuffer effects which is faster.
Even made a guide for custom shaders in OGL2 for ePSXe.http://forums.ngemu.com/showthread.php?t=76098

Also, the 60FPS thing displayed is not real framerate, rather, its the emulation framerate. ~60FPS being NTSC/J and ~55FPS for PAL.

usually depends if you are using the original PSX resolution (internal and screen, software rendering) or enhanced with vertex and fragment shader post process effects, (tho today even an IGP could do it easily, Pete's OGL and D3D plugins are mostly optimized for ATi and nVidia graphics)

the hardest thing to emulate quickly is the frame buffer so all frame buffer effects are really slow unless you use a software renderer, <3 pSX 1.13... dunno if thats whats going on but it definately could be, no matter how fast your hardware is framebuffer effects are gonna suck on n64 and psx with 3d acceleration on

note: my info is like 12 years old so i could be just be uneducated on modern emulation

It also depends on the games you're trying to emulate. Sometimes you even need to change settings for each level, I remember I did so in Syphon Filter. But generally epsxe runs well for all the games (at least all those games I played worked great).

p.s.
pcsx2 is a different story, lol all ps2 games had at least minor glitches, some not playable at all. Unfortunately all these projects are unofficial or discontinued. I wish there was some official emulator with proper hardware acceleration. But it's history now. Because of idiotic console exclusivity we have to jump through hoops just to get decent games up and running. /rant

Discontinued? PCSX2 is going strong(er). Almost every week/day a new build is comin out and a major one if the fixes and optimization are high enough. Devs even added FXAA (nVidia's fast approximate AA), AVX support (advanced vector extensions) and one of the noticeable addition is MTVU (multi threaded VU emualtion) which can take advantage of 3 or more threads for emulation (still wip so there are still issues).

Some Gundam games also run slow and Tekken 5/Valkyrie Profile 2 has several glitches (playable tho), the devs somehow focuses on more popular games and FFX was one of he better optimized ones. But at least there was an improvement from last time where some of the games won't even boot, PS2 has a large library and lot of work is needed to make em all playable (ePSXe has a very high compatibility but there are still issues and glitches)

(ePSXe has a very high compatibility but there are still issues and glitches)

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Yes Duke Nukem Time To Kill hangs if you just watch the demo screen and don't press start.
Duke Nukem Land of the Babes has game stopping bugs, even tho this game runs perfectly on sssxs or something (forgot its name). Nightmare Creatures 2 has game stopping bugs as well. It's all the games I tried, my actual ps collection.

ePSXe has been stalled now afaik, latest was 1.7.0 which was released years after 1.6.0, most folks are lookin at PCSX2 and Dolphin now, Dolphin in particular has been progressing faster vs PCSX2 probably because of the architecture (PS2 has a much more complex hardware to emulate vs the Wii/GameCube)

If you ever want to play when not at your computer and have a reasonably fast Android phone, you can buy fpsece. It started off a little slow at launch but my Droid X pretty much runs everything at more than full speed now. I've beaten FFT and FF9 on it so far. It's even multi-threaded for dual core phones / tablets and you can use a wireless controller.

There was a brief moment when I wondered if we had truly hit the technology zenith when FF7 became playable on the shitter. Also you can sync the memory card with dropbox, just have to change the file extension and it'll load fine on a PC emulator.

If you ever want to play when not at your computer and have a reasonably fast Android phone, you can buy fpsece. It started off a little slow at launch but my Droid X pretty much runs everything at more than full speed now. I've beaten FFT and FF9 on it so far. It's even multi-threaded for dual core phones / tablets and you can use a wireless controller.

There was a brief moment when I wondered if we had truly hit the technology zenith when FF7 became playable on the shitter. Also you can sync the memory card with dropbox, just have to change the file extension and it'll load fine on a PC emulator.

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How are the controls for FF7? I'd love to go back and play that again (heck I even have the PC version). Wonder if I could just flat out install it on an android phone lol